Double-sided adhesive tapes have been widely used for, for example, fixing parts of electronic equipment in place. Specifically, the double-sided adhesive tapes have been used for, for example, fixing a protective panel for image displays which constitutes compact electronic equipment such as a portable electronic device, a camera, or a computer to the casing thereof or fixing exterior parts and rigid parts such as a battery to the compact electronic equipment.
A known example of the double-sided adhesive tapes is a double-sided adhesive tape including a flexible foam base with both surfaces thereof being laminated with an adhesive layer (e.g., see PTL 1), which has a small thickness and high conformability to adherends.
The double-sided adhesive tapes have been required to have impact resistance high enough to prevent, even when the portable electronic device was, for example, dropped, adherends such as parts of the portable electronic device from, for example, being detached or separated from the portable electronic device due to the impact.
In addition, due to reductions in the thicknesses and improvement of the functions of the portable electronic devices and the like, thin and expensive parts composed of a tabular rigid body, such as a protection panel constituting an image display, an image-display module, and a thin battery, have been widely used.
Such expensive parts are preferably readily detachable (i.e., separated) from an electronic device or the like when a malfunction or the like occurred in the portable electronic device or the like and, for example, reusable.
Accordingly, double-sided adhesive tapes, which are used for fixing such parts in place, are required to have a characteristic of being readily dismantled into pieces through the application of a certain amount of force to the tape.
Residual objects such as paste constituting the double-sided adhesive tape are likely to remain on the surfaces of the parts (i.e., adherends) that are separated from one another by the application of a force to the tape.
In general, when the parts are reused, such residual objects remaining on the surfaces of the parts are removed manually.
However, when attempt is made to remove a residual object by holding and, for example, pulling the edge of the residual object, the residual object may fail to be removed from the surfaces of the parts to a sufficient degree since a residual object is likely to be, for example, broken when being pulled.